Dozerfleet Machinomic Downloadables
Dozerfleet Machinomic Downloadables (often shortened to Machinomic Downloadables or DzMD) is a product line of Dozerfleet Labs. It started life as the Cormorant Sims Downloads Collection from 2005 to 2006, and was later renamed the Dozerfleet Sims Downloads Collection. It was renamed All Things Sims in 2008, and later Utterly Sims in 2009. It functioned as an extension of The Dozerfleet Forum until 2012, and consisted primarily of offering players of The Sims 2 and The Sims 3 with opportunities to introduce Dozerfleet Comics characters to their gameplay. A few other companies' creations were also recreated, and offered for distribution. Downloads themselves were hosted on MediaFire, and often linked to. After being taken down in 2012, it was brought back on February 4th of 2013 - but only as a tech center for discussing game bugs in association with such entities as NRaas Industries, RoseSims, and Mod The Sims. The download service was restored on Tumblr on January 5th of 2014, around 8:15 PM EST. It received its current name on September 8th of 2014, after Utterly Sims was integrated into the Dozerfleet Labs on Tumblr Downloads Catalog. Also in September of 2014, the catalog service expanded its horizons into offering discussion of MakeHuman and a limited series of re-creations made with HeroMachine. The Sims franchise section of Machinomic Downloadables was expanded to include recreations of characters for The Sims 4 that were either planned for in Sims 2 or Sims 3 and didn't get produced in time, or else were especially popular entries for inclusion in those games. History Early history 2005 DzMD began in 2005 where it began life as the Cormorant Entertainment Sims Downloads Collection. It later became the Dozerfleet Sim Downloads Collection, hosted on Mod The Sims. The first major upload was actually not of a Dozerfleet property, but a Hana-Barbera one. The three time travelers from Hana-Barbera's The Greatest Adventure: Stories from the Bible were uploaded to MTS2 servers in the fall of 2005. At that same time, the Dozerfleet founder was attempting to create Gerosha Prime's version of Ciem 2, and was creating it and Gerosha Prime's Ciem 3: Curse of the Millipede simultaneously. Production also had to share time with The Blue Face Film Strips: The Sims 2 Edition, Star Flops: Curse of the Medium Side, Corando's "Don't Lose Hope" Music Video, and Lo-Mun's Cooking Adventure. Innovations around the time also included a recolor for Oberkorn's Sky Projector for The Sims 2, and a wallpaper dubbed "Mary Perry's Teepee Wallpaper." While most of these were readily accepted by MTS2 staff, the diner from Grillitan Diner 2 was rejected due to its multiple complexities of content, as well as issues with screenshots. By December, production had picked up speed. There were Sim versions of Theodore and Amos from Disney's The Apple Dumpling Gang available for download. A month before that, a 2.02 MB house file was uploaded dubbed the "New Starter's House." It would later be renamed "Tina Nares' Bachelor's Paradise House." Briseis, as depicted in the film Troy, was offered in September, along with the Greatest Adventure protagonists. 2006 The WELS MSU and LCC Campus Ministry Center at 704 Abbott R. in East Lansing was uploaded to MTS2 in April of 2006. Listed as a Greek House in the game, it became popular with a small number of site visitors, particularly those living in East Lansing. A month later, the Cyrillic Checkpoint Sign of the Playstation 2 version of Ghost Recon was uploaded. It too met with positive reaction, as many thought it amusing that a prop from one video game had been adapted for another. As speculation mounted for what expansion pack would follow after Open For Business, the Dozerfleet founder developed an in-depth proposal for The Sims 2: Exotic Destiny (see below.) While some of its components were rejected outright by EA, a lot of them were adapted slightly and included in Bon Voyage and Seasons. The werewolves were included in Pets. Trouble began brewing as relationships broke down in the latter half of 2006. "The (Sim) MASK," a package set adapting The Mask for Sims 2, was soundly rejected. And following the beginnings of hardware failure in the HP desktop PC being used at the time, it became obvious that Despair Gerosha Ciem would need to be canceled. That PC later died completely when the power box suffered a malfunction. Given its custom design, the only replacement was an expensive one from HP. All important files from the Cormorant era that had not been backed up to a disc somewhere were soon lost to the ages. The Dozerfleet founder received a Dell Inspiron 6000 laptop from 2004 as a Christmas present, and it proved critical to survival in the post-Pavillion era. 2007 Near the beginning of 2007, the Dozerfleet founder began working on an encyclopedia on Wikispaces that would document all things pertaining to Dozerfleet history. That wiki became the original Dozerfleet Database. Mods were still primarily hosted at MTS2 at this point. However, negotiations were beginning to break down when HystericalParoxysm began intercepting more and more uploads, finding increasingly arbitrary reasons to reject uploads. The Generation: Hot Coffee T-shirt was rejected not because the joke of a single literal coffee mug was ruled weak; but because the screenshots were "underwhelming." Attempts to re-upload with much better screenshots also failed, with other reasons given. Movie posters of The Bison were uploaded, but not well-received. They did, however, feature in the background of Candi and Miriam's room in Chapter 1 of Ciem. A set of Surf-One Luau-II-patterned seats, modeled after the flight seats of Flight 121 in Snakes on a Plane, were also submitted to MTS2. They were accepted, and achieved at least 30-some downloads. The T-shirts that went with were not accepted, however. Both eventually featured at Sci-Fi Sims. This is not to say that all mods were being rejected after the seats. A Scarface Beverages set of table and wall hanging, parodying Starbucks, was accepted. The most popular set published was the Stretch Skeleton Accessories Kit. A calculator was made in VB.NET for measuring Sims' heights by converting English measurements to stretchSkeleton cheat decimals. A metric version was released alongside it. Also released was a QBasic calculator that allowed the user to choose whether they wanted English or metric measurements. Finally, there was an "animation advisory," which told users whether or not two Sims whose heights were altered with the stretchSkeleton cheat would be able to look good in a picture if told to engage in romantic interactions. Combined, the kit received well over a thousand downloads and earned the Dozerfleet founder a "mad scientist" badge at MTS2. There was also a wallpaper set released in 2007: a mural for a fictional fraternity dubbed "Multis Canis Arborem." While not necessarily correct Latin, it was meant to roughly translate as "The Many Dogs of Many Trees." Life on The Dozerfleet Forum 2008 At this point, all the production work was finished for Ciem. It would take another year of post-production for the comic to be ready for publication. However, relations between Dozerfleet Productions and the soon-to-be-renamed MTS2 began to deteriorate rapidly. Not only were chat staff not open and friendly, they were growing outright hostile. In spite of the rules, users like never before spent more time reveling in their personal life sexual perversions than actually talking about the valuable things that had once made the community special. Any attempt to make the conversation about anything else was quickly met with vicious attacks and personal mockery. Because of this, the Dozerfleet founder all but completely swore off the chat. With all the buzz that The Sims 3 had a release date right around the corner, MTS2 decided to change its name to Mod The Sims, reflecting that it would support mods for both Sims 2 and 3''. Still angry with certain members of a Sims-themed message board, the Dozerfleet founder decided to get his own message board. This became the first version of The Dozerfleet Forum, hosted at Proboards. Due to personal issues with certain staff members at MTS in 2008, as well as a desire to improve certain items, hosting at MTS was halted. Instead, items started being hosted at MediaFire. Tech spec assistance method disagreements were another issue, with the term "BI-SWILS" resulting in a lot of arguments due to an administrator complaining that it made ''Sims 2 "sound like it has AIDS." That same administrator also complained that the younger, stupider members playing their Sims games would get confused by all the acronyms that All Things Dozerfleet Sims offered. (Read: She herself was confused by them. So therefore, all players less "prestigious" than herself would automatically be "too stupid" to figure them out.) By the summer of 2008, all mod threads were moved to the Forum. The service itself was officially separated from Mod The Sims. It went by the moniker "All Things Sims," unaware that another service by that name already existed. A section for Sims 2 downloads was created, followed by a section anticipating Sims 3 mods. Alas, the BBCode restrictions at Proboards made forum hosting of mods very limited. The only new creations, besides a short-lived Sim version of friend-at-the-time Ka Pang Lee, was a Pseudo-chroma key wallpaper and the downloadable Sims set of Becka Rangers: Nemo Thunder. 2009 After switching wikis from Wikispaces to Wiki-Site farming in 2008, DozerfleetWiki on Wiki-Site was eagerly looking to grow and expand, becoming a full-fledged wiki of all things Dozerfleet. It soon became the one and only DozerfleetWiki, having previously been dubbed "DozerfleetWiki 2" while the Wikispaces service was still operational. Efforts to flesh the wiki out took precedence over anything else, so 2009 became a year when very little was produced for the Sims Downloads Collection. More emphasis was being placed on Every Ape and His Brother. The year 2009 was also the year in which the 24.180 Troll attacked the site and sought to defame Every Ape. The Forum saw itself used very little for actual addition of new content. It mostly became a log for old content from the defunct MySpace page. There were some style facelifts, however. And the All Things Sims section got a few enhancements added. Ciem was published to Mod The Sims Social, where it has already garnered 20,319 views as of July 24th of 2012. Work began on Ciem 2, but the comic and its sequel were canceled for numerous reasons soon afterward. Three chapters were completed of Ciem 2, with 4 and 5 almost finished. The largest reason for the comics' cancellation was that they were time-consuming in a time when the Dozerfleet founder had too many other things going on. Another was health issues. A third was a desire to reboot the story into a series of novels that could be sold for profit, and that would do things with the story not originally possible. Another was the desire to start using Sims 3 as an engine for storyboards, upgrading significantly from Sims 2. Also, work on Blood Over Water ate into a lot of the time that would have been required to make Ciem 2 work. 2010 By 2010, Proboards was beginning to look less adequate than ever for All Things Sims, or any other Dozerfleet needs. It was discovered that another service was calling itself "All Things Sims," thus prompting the name change to Utterly Sims. There was little that could be done by the Dozerfleet founder early in 2010, since time spent on Ferris in Focus and Ferris State Live cut into Dozerfleet Web Network Maintenance time. Wiki coverage of FSL and FiF projects often could just barely keep up, as the need to produce content cut into the time it would have taken to report on it. Complicating matters, January of 2010 is when the Dozerfleet founder completed work on a video dubbed Ties That Confide: Reception Wishes. The video commemorated the wedding of Jill and Trevor Paul in August of 2009. While at SWOCC Studios, the (usually) laid-back atmosphere offered the Dozerfleet founder enough spare time to come up with improvements to the forum. It was switched over from Proboards to Forumotion, which was much more powerful. However, Forumotion proved to be very high-maintenance. In this time, support for Sims 3 sprang rapidly into existence. The need to separate Dozerfleet Comics characters from non-Dozerfleet items and characters resulted in each game's downloadables being split into categories. All non-Dozerfleet items and characters were categorized as "Other." All characters and items from The Gerosha Chronicles were lumped into the Gerosha Multiverse Pack. This included downloads for both Classic Ciem and Comprehensive Ciem. All characters and items from Stationery Voyagers became the Stationery Voyagers Universe Pack. Early Sims 3 support proved daunting, but characters gradually became more story-accurate. Life on the database 2011 Fed up with the high maintenance of Forumotion, the Dozerfleet founder abandoned it entirely. Also fed up with the inefficiency of Wiki-Site, the Dozerfleet founder switched services to Wikia. Utterly Sims was merged with the wiki, and each item was cataloged on the wiki and offered a download link on the appropriate article. Forumotion was abandoned. Before The Dozerfleet Forum was given a home on the wiki, it was ruled as "discontinued." Its old political topic posts became part of The Dozerfleet Blog, which had a short life on Blogger before also being merged with the wiki. 2012 Utterly Sims production was slowed to a snail's pace in 2012, as work resumed on the later-canceled Ciem: Vigilante Centipede. Election 2012 coverage, as well as the Ruth Webber Fund and Stop the Crooked Rainbow Campaign, took up a lot of time that could have gone towards developing Sims. For the book covers for Ciem: Vigilante Centipede and Ciem: Nuclear Crisis, the Dozerfleet founder discovered an open source program dubbed "MakeHuman." In July of 2012, the founder discovered that EA Games had been forced by the Gay Mafia to choose sides in the culture war. EA Games regrettably chose to side with the Gaystapo, allowing itself to be extorted. It tried to cover up the dark reality of this by insulting traditional families, claiming that traditional marriage was "bad for business." This same hushed confession to being extorted was also uttered by the CEO of General Mills Cereals. After agreeing to the Dump Starbucks and Dump General Mills petitions, the Dozerfleet founder discovered the Crooked Rainbow was targeting Chick-fil-A for defamation and harassment; since its founder supports traditional marriage instead of crooked pseudomarriage. To show solidarity with Chick-fil-A for refusing to cave under pressure, the Dozerfleet founder decided to send a message to EA. This was done by declaring that, effective July 23rd of 2012, all Utterly Sims operations were to be discontinued. Utterly Sims Help articles were be archived, but still accessible through the wiki's forum. All downloads were pulled. Anyone wanting one is advised to contact the Dozerfleet founder directly and ask for an e-mail attachment. While the Dozerfleet founder will still use some Sims software for storyboards, and create new characters as needed, no new characters after July 23rd are offered for download. All pending projects for Sims 3 downloads were canceled. On July 23rd, the Facebook page for Utterly Sims went permanently offline. Work on shutting down all download offer articles began on July 24th of 2012. Pursuit of software to replace Sims was underway. 2013 The Help Center of Utterly Sims was revived on Monday, February 4th of 2013 as part of retooling a group on Facebook. Contributors could discuss bugs in the game, and provide each other with links or advice on how to fix those bugs. The downloads remained archived, however. Life on Tumblr On January 5th of 2014 at 8:15 PM EST, Utterly Sims was restored as a download center. It was given its own blog, as a part of the Dozerfleet Blog network. Old wiki content from the database began to be transferred over to the new service. Several files from 2010 were to be updated, and new information posted to reflect new requirements to handle the new character files. Characters made with only EA content and recolors were to be made available for download as full package files. By contrast, characters requiring other content would have links to the other content supplied with "recipes" to generate their looks. The sites design and focus were altered slightly from before, to convey a film and video aficionado aesthetic as opposed to the more generic theme it had before. By September of 2014, Utterly Sims was renamed to Dozerfleet Machinomic Downloadables. Its focus would be on MakeHuman, HeroMachine, The Sims 2, The Sims 3, and The Sims 4; with room to expand to other games and media on an available basis. DzMD was merged into the Dozerfleet Labs blog, complete with a total overhaul of the category system to accommodate the move. The old Utterly Sims blog on Tumblr was officially deleted at 7:34 PM EST on Saturday, November 15th of 2014, as its uploads had been completely absorbed into the DzMD system at the Dozerfleet Labs blog. Life on DeviantArt In early March of 2016, the DzMD platform on Tumblr was migrated away to DeviantArt, operating through the folders system for the Dozerfleet founder's 'BulldozerIvan account there. Downloadable files themselves were made available on MediaFire, whereas preview images would contain captions providing links to the files. This became both a backup system for the DzMD files on Mod the Sims, and an extra venue for those mods which might not meet MTS' rigorous standards. In 2017, in keeping with Volkonir Meets the Power Rangers, some [[w:c:powerrangers:Power Rangers (2017 movie)|2017 Power Rangers film]] accessories were made available for download to the DeviantArt page. The Emo Rangers were made a short time later for the same format. Return to MTS In late October of 2014, it was decided that certain items in DzMD's inventory (particularly for Sims 4) would be shared both on DzMD and on Mod The Sims. The first item uploaded was a Sharknado 2 T-shirt set, which gained nearly 100 downloads in only two weeks' time. It was followed up by a web-ported re-issue of The StretchSkeleton Cheat Accessories Kit, released on November 8th of 2014. Within a day, that upload achieved over 60 downloads. It was patched shortly after release to fix an issue with webkit-oriented browsers not loading gradients properly. The success continued on November 14th of 2014 with SCP-811 for The Sims 4. That item gained over 65 downloads in only two days, in that same time gaining half as many views as were the case at that time for the StretchSkeleton Calculators. This pushed the MTS version of DzMD to over 500 downloads. This came on the heels of staff very narrowly deciding to reject the Topaz Gorillas, largely due to the amount of Photoshop work required to give them all their fur. However, that decision led to the user "Heaven" declaring that a machinomic of the Topaz Gorillas' adventures should be made. This led to the immediate retooling of Q-Basic Gorillas: The Movie as a DSHW Machinomic with potential for a BBCode release for MTS Social. While this was put on hold for development of Sodality: Vindication, Cherinob, Volkonir: Rise of Semaphry, and Camelorum Adventures, the project for the Gorillas remains in consideration. MTS hosting proved successful with continued through 2016, with Lemon Witch, Ion Boy, and Semaphore all becoming popular quickly. By January of 2019, support was dropped for Sims 2 and Sims 3 downloads. See also * Quiz: How Much Do You Really Know About The Sims 2 and its Community? * ** Proposal for The Sims 2: Exotic Destiny, updated with details concerning what got adapted and what was rejected. External links * BulldozerIvan at Mod The Sims * DzMD home page on DeviantArt Category: DzMD Category: Dozerfleet Labs projects